On her desk, Cecilia Conrad ’76 keeps two colorful monsters, Basma and Jad, and a baby goat, Ma’zooza. These furry friends are the Muppet stars of Ahlan Simsim, an Arabic-language version of Sesame Street that began airing in the Middle East and North Africa in 2020.

Conrad helped make Ahlan Simsim a reality—and a success—during her tenure as managing director of the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change competition, which awarded Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee a $100 million grant. The competition is for projects that target social problems, and the puppets remind her of the show’s impact: It reaches and supports millions of children in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, many of whose lives have been upended by conflict. (Jad was forced to flee his home, and Basma welcomed him when he arrived in his new community.)

Now, Conrad is CEO of Lever for Change, a MacArthur Foundation initiative born out of 100&Change. It’s filling a gap in philanthropy by helping donors who don’t want to start a foundation give money in an equitable way that engages outside experts.

“We’re uncovering the best ideas from the best teams—including some that would have gone unrecognized but for the open call,” Conrad says.
She previously led and is now a senior advisor for the prestigious MacArthur Fellows Program, which gives so-called “genius grants” of $800,000 no-strings-attached seed money to writers, scientists, and entrepreneurs with outstanding talent to use for their creative endeavors. (The more than 1,000 fellows given grants since the program started in 1981 have included four Wellesley alumnae: historian Ayesha Jalal ’78, astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala ’90, legal scholar Patricia J. Williams ’73, and anthropologist Rita Corsi Wright ’75.)

Conrad came to the world of philanthropy after a decades-long career in academia, during which she focused on economics. In 2002, she was recognized as California’s Carnegie Professor of the Year, and she received the National Urban League’s Women of Power Award and the National Economic Association’s Samuel Z. Westerfield Award.

In both her philanthropy work and teaching, she has cultivated a passion for supporting other peoples’ growth, development, and big ideas.
“It’s fun living vicariously through the great things people are doing,” she says. “And there’s nothing like seeing your students excel.” Conrad is proud of her former students and mentees, including economist Trevon Logan, a professor at Ohio State University who directs the National Bureau of Economic Research’s working group on race and stratification in the economy.

Conrad grew up in the segregated South in the 1950s, where early experiences piqued her interest in civic engagement and making an impact. In Dallas, she watched her mother sit in at lunch counters. Her father, a surgeon and one of just a handful of Black doctors in the hospital where he worked, was the first Black person elected to citywide office there.

In 1963, at 8 years old, Conrad marched after civil rights activist Medgar Wiley Evers was killed. During the presidential election the following year, when incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, ran against Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, she helped her mother convince voters to stay in line after poll workers said people still waiting outside after the polls closed couldn’t vote.

“Mom was an activist out on the street, and dad was working behind the scenes,” Conrad says. Both instilled in her a sense of responsibility to speak up and help others. “It was about making sure all people had opportunities,” Conrad says.

Over the years, it’s also been about calling out and disrupting destructive behaviors. At an economics seminar, for example, Conrad, then a newly tenured professor, was alerted by one of her students that primarily men were having side conversations during women’s talks.

“I thought that was really disrespectful,” she says. “I said to myself, ‘It’s your responsibility to speak up,’ so I turned around and I said, ‘Hush!’”
Conrad first became curious about economics in junior high, when she was fascinated to learn about the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement and conference, where gold became the basis for the U.S. dollar, with other currencies pegged to its value. “I got really interested in who these people were and what an economist was,” she says.

Women’s colleges came onto her radar when her mother hosted a Seven Sisters event at the request of a local Wellesley alumna, Hortense Landauer Sanger ’32. Conrad applied to Wellesley, Smith, and Vassar. She accepted Smith’s offer. The next day, she had second thoughts. “I was a city person,” she says. She phoned Wellesley, which had accepted her, too, and was let in. “It was a last-minute call, and it was a good call,” says Conrad.

At Wellesley, she majored in economics. When she was distressed after doing poorly in an intermediate microeconomics class, she spoke to her professor. “Is there any hope for me in the field?” she asked. Her professor offered encouragement and support. Years later, after receiving her Ph.D. in economics from Stanford, she encountered the economics professor at a conference. “He said, ‘I guess there is hope for you,’” Conrad says.

She says studying economics at a women’s college was fortuitous, because at Wellesley, it didn’t occur to her that economics was a male-dominated field (and it still is). In a co-ed environment, she says, she may have felt overwhelmed or defeated and given up.

Partway through her graduate program at Stanford, Conrad took a position at the Federal Trade Commission, where she focused on the regulation of industry and antitrust policy. “I wanted to see what it was like to be an economist,” she says. She finished her Ph.D. in 1982, then landed a job as assistant professor of economics at Duke University.

The bulk of her work as an economist focused on the effect of race and gender on economic status. As a professor at Barnard in the 1980s and ’90s, Conrad redeveloped an existing course on sex and economic discrimination to focus more on women of color. Later, at Pomona College, she created a class on race and the U.S. economy. “Data and facts can be inroads into difficult conversations,” she says. She diversified student groups for projects by putting people who came from different ZIP codes together.

Conrad served as vice president for academic affairs and dean and as acting president at Pomona, where she expanded the college’s summer undergraduate research program to include the arts and humanities. She has also served as vice president and dean of faculty at Scripps College.
Around the same time, she was asked to join the MacArthur Fellows Program selection committee. Over the years, she reviewed hundreds of nominee files. “It was exciting,” she says, “almost like being at Wellesley again, reading materials in different disciplines. I found myself thinking about topics I would not have thought about otherwise, like quantum computing.”

Conrad joined the MacArthur Foundation full-time in 2013. Now, she is tackling issues like racial inequity, gender inequality, access to economic opportunity, and climate change through the Lever for Change-facilitated grants. Since 2019, Lever for Change has helped distribute more than $1.6 billion for social good, supporting some 145 organizations. Their work has helped 10 million Texans gain access to mental health care and provided support to 1 million refugees in 10 different countries, among other accomplishments. Conrad hopes to disperse another $1.5 billion by 2025. Her ultimate goal, she says, is to create a philanthropic sector “as bold as the change it seeks to achieve.”